Tacky

From the momentMitt Romney stepped off stage
Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote
only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign
quickly began to disassemble itself.Aides taking cabs home late
that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked
to the campaign no longer worked.

“Fiscally conservative,” sighed one aide the next day.

Cheap and tacky is what it really is. It’s charming that they treat their own people like 47% riff-raff.

I guess Willard really meant it when he said he liked firing people…

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17 thoughts on “Tacky”

ok. So he didn’t have anything written but a victory speech, but he had a cancellation form ready for each and every credit card???
I’m gonna have to look up his concession speech. Knowing how bad he was at the convention, something he wrote for himself on the spur of the moment must have been priceless.
Seeing the epic fail despite all the MSM bravado about how close it would be (making me envision another Florida style hanging chad month) his supporters are upset about the lack of return on their investment? Well if the Koch brothers are such good businessmen, it seems that they would recognize whether they are good at statistics or not – and if not make an investment and get a statistician to advise them. In short, they made a gamble, and the roulette ball didn’t fall in their slot. So the American way is that they bet on the wrong number.
Plus wouldn’t the epic fail be more like the Great Gatsby than Ayn Rand?
And if you want more comic relief, appear that Keyes has filed suit in Florida to try to get the courts to seize the election machines (also citing massive electoral irregularities). Like Florida tried to rig the election for the dems in 2000, huh?

I can see two scenarios for why that would happen, and neither are very flattering.
1) Those cards were canceled effective Tuesday regardless of the outcome of the election, which means Romney could havewon and his staff would still be hung out to dry
2) When it became clear that Romney wasn’t going to win, someone frantically started shutting down all unnecessary campaign expenditures without bothering to tell anyone
The decent thing to do would be to tell those staffers you’ll reimburse them; Romney’s probably lost more money than that in the laundry.

“I’m gonna have to look up his concession speech. Knowing how bad he was at the convention, something he wrote for himself on the spur of the moment must have been priceless.”
It was only about five minutes long, and I remember thinking about a minute in ‘this is part of his normal stump speech, but with the verbs changed from present tense to past tense.” It got slightly better, but it isn’t going into ‘history’ with Al Gore and Adlai Stevenson, et al.
As for ‘cab fare’, literal and metaphorical: ‘Cab fare’ is the least the average person would do. But Romney isn’t the average person; providing cab fare to him would be the equivalent of us giving each of them a penny and saying ‘thanks’. And he couldn’t even bring himself to do that!

@Jay, I’ll go even further.
The staffers are staff (that is employees). I Don’t have their contracts, but apparently the campaign, as a company, paid the employees for their travel. Most pay transportation expenses and some sort of daily expense (whether it is re-paying them for receipts or a per diem).
It seems reasonable to assume that not all the staffers lived in the same city as the celebration.
Also, as the staffers were traveling (and had been traveling for months) on the company credit card, I can imagine that some might not have packed wads of their own cash (the business-like thing to do would have been to tell them at least a week in advance that their cards would dissolve on such and such a date.)
The company paid to get them to the “celebration.” The company is responsible for getting them home.

Those cards were canceled effective Tuesday regardless of the outcome of the election, which means Romney could have won and his staff would still be hung out to dry
I think that’s likelier.
Let us not forget that when Romney was running the Salt Lake Olympics, he bought pizzas for $5 apiece, cut them into 8 slices, and sold them to his staffers. Coca-Cola provided unlimited soda; those cans were sold to his workers for 25 cents. Very Ayn Rand.
I hope these whiny staffers are reminded that they’re members of the party that ran against Free Stuff, so this is working out very well for them.

Just thought – wonder if any of the staffers there were staying at a hotel and planning to pay for it with their credit card on check-out? Not sure what city they were in but the article says the HQ was in Boston, and I know what a decent room in downtown Boston costs.

Yeah, the whole notion that the costs associated with the campaign “ended” magically at midnight on election night is very odd. The campaign never ended then–there’s always clean up. This is no different from a Sports Stadium refusing to pay the clean up staff their wages because “the game ended hours ago.”
aimai

Amazing that Willard didn’t end his concession speech with:
“And to the many campaign workers and staffers that put their hearts and souls into the effort that culminated in the result tonight: YOU’RE FIRED!
Now GET OUT”
there were probably too many throwable pieces of food in the hands of the ‘help’ that night, which made Willard hold back.

Double cherry-
Insider blog from a Romney volunteer on the disaster of their GOTV for election day ORCA program. He thinks it might have stymied the efforts of 30,000 volunteers on 11/6.The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
I remember discussions about who might be competent enough to run a hot dog stand- Do you?

MapleStreet:
True; my point was, regardless of whether or not it was an honest mistake, a miscommunication on when the cards were to be canceled, a contractual obligation, or whatever, Romney should just say “send the campaign the bills and we’ll reimburse you.” Or do it out of his own pocket just to be a classy guy.
But Romney does not give, and has never given, a fuck about anyone outside of his clan and/or income bracket, and he never will.
This anecdote is the perfect microcosm of his relationship with the rest of society; when you are of no more use to him, you cease to be a factor in his world.

Of course I can’t find the exact comment now that I’m trying to, but –early this morning I was reading about this credit card cancellation on reddit. An angry Romney staffer commented on there that she knew young minimum-wage paid people in the campaign that were frantically calling mom or dad to get help. I recall another commenter saying that McCain didn’t do this to his staff – so it’s not like all the Republican presidential candidates are doin’ it so why shouldn’t Mitt.

The first question is, of course, is it true.
Certainly it will not be the first time that a “businessman” shut down the business and flew by night without paying the employees. I think that was his business model at Bain, so even if the story is not true it is so excruciatingly believable that it may as well be true.